Featured Free Software

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Radio Shark 2, a TiVo for your Radio...and more

My kids are awesome. They bought me a new computer/radio toy (the perfect mix) for Father's Day. OK, I know, I know...I'm a geek, and radio is boring, but WAIT!!! ...here's a taste of the radio-control prowess I now posess via my meager computer: I can pause and rewind live radio with the Radio Shark (I dont mean herky-jerky Internet radio stations either, I mean FM/AM stations in real-time), just like TiVo--if I want to hear a song again, I just hit rewind. RadioShark records on my computer (constantly in the background) just like the original, and I can move back and forth through the stream or return to the live broadcast. Second reason I love it...I can let radio Shark record away for hours and hours, and it will go back at intervals and sift through the data it has recorded and analyze it. It looks for the song patterns that real music will produce in the stream and isolates them, and converts them to mp3s. I can download the songs to my iPod, throwing out the commercials and DJ blather--and, if the FM station is trasmitting song ID tags in the FM transmission (some stations are now doing that), I even get all the song information as well (or input it manually).

Recording with SnapTunesWait!!! ...There's much more!! Radio Shark's software (which you guys can also download for free called SnapTunes One) even works with Internet Radio, and will search out songs and programs the same way as on regular radio, and guess what? It even supports line-in recording, so you can use your own radio tuner with it. Yep, that's right...you don't even need a Radio Shark. Simply connect your radio tuner to the line-in port on your sound card in the back of your computer. Tune in a radio station and start recording with SnapTunes, and walk away and leave it go for several hours. It may take a few days of experimenting for it to find the pattern in your local stations, but eventually it will learn. The quality isn't as high as a CD, but it's exactly as good as the original radio station reception (which is good enough for stereo quality).

RadioSHARK 2 Features

# RadioSHARK 2 gives you control of how and when you listen to your favorite radio shows.# Record any AM or FM radio broadcast# Record what you are listening to at the moment or set the RadioSHARK 2to record at a specific date and time# Allows time-shift recording to "pause" live radio, although this recording cannot be saved as a file. The audio is kept in a temporary space on the hard drive for playback.# Records in AAC, MP3, WMA, and AIFF files# USB connectivity# Mac and Windows compatible# Software for both platforms is included